Everyone’s got some greatness in them . . . But in order to really mine it, you have to own it. You have to grab hold of it. You have to believe it.
—Shonda Rhimes
When I was young, I used to ask a lot of questions. So many that my mom, exasperated, finally said to me one day: “You should become a reporter. Then you can get paid for asking questions.”
I was only in middle school at that point, but I was intrigued. And when my parents gave me a copy of Newsweek a few years later, I read it cover to cover, imagining how incredible it would be to get paid to do what the people who wrote those articles must get to do each day: ask interesting people questions about interesting topics in interesting places. At the age of thirteen, I declared that I was going to be a journalist when I grew up, and that I would work at Newsweek.
To their credit, my parents didn’t try to discourage me—even though we lived in Dallas at the time, 1,500 miles away from Newsweek headquarters, and I was just starting high school and had never taken a journalism class. I’d go on to join my high school newspaper. And when I went off to study journalism in college, I felt lucky to already be so certain about the profession I wanted to pursue. I felt especially fortunate when, in my late twenties—after years of sending emails and months of interviews, calls, and waiting—I got a job as a junior-level reporter at Newsweek.
I loved the work I did so much that it hardly felt like work most days. It felt meaningful. It allowed me to spend time with fascinating and often inspiring people. And I was writing every day, something I’d enjoyed doing since I was a kid. I remember several times as a reporter, both at Newsweek and at the newspapers where I’d worked beforehand, saying to myself, “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this!”
Ultimately, that’s what we want, right? A job that doesn’t feel like one. Work that is so enjoyable and fulfilling that it often doesn’t even seem like work. The only problem was that I wasn’t getting paid very much to do it. (I’d made so little in my first job that I’d qualified for food stamps and had to get an extra part-time job just to cover expenses.) In all the career conversations I’d had with my parents, my professors, and my college advisor, the subject of salaries had strangely never come up. The message had simply been to pursue what I was passionate about and the money would follow.
Eventually, my salary did grow. But by the time I had that midnight wake-up call in my early thirties, I realized that the income I was making was not going to be enough to support the life I wanted—or even the short-term goals we had to expand our family and find a home big enough to accommodate a second child. So in order to earn more, I decided to shift course and move into management.
While I have no regrets—I’ve earned and learned a lot as I’ve moved up in management—I realize now, looking back, that maybe I went about it the wrong way. What if I’d been paying attention to the salary from the start and thinking like a breadwinner? Would I have made different choices? Probably. I’m pretty certain I still would have pursued journalism. But maybe I would have picked up an extra part-time job sooner so that I could be sure to cover my bills and still save some money. Maybe I would have moved earlier onto the editor track, which paid more. Maybe I would have sought out higher-paying publications rather than taking the first journalism job I got. Maybe I would have advocated more for myself early on and actually negotiated my salaries.
I also began to wonder if maybe I’d asked the wrong question when I started thinking about how to increase my income. Rather than asking how I could get paid more to do what I loved and did well, I’d asked, What else can I do to earn more?
The underlying assumption, of course, is that you can do what you love or you can get paid well. But unless you are lucky and talented enough to become a pro tennis player, say, or a pop star—or you happen to love and be adept at business, financial analysis, or performing surgery—you typically can’t have both. More commonly, our passions and interests don’t align in obvious ways with high-paying occupations. So we feel we have to either pursue a job we love that doesn’t pay us what we need or take a job that pays well and try to indulge our passions on the side.
The problem with the advice we often get to just pursue our passions is that it leaves out a critical part of the equation: the pay! I can’t tell you the number of people who told me how incredibly lucky I was when I mentioned how much I loved my reporting job—as if I’d won the lottery!—without even considering the fact that I was getting paid so little that I could barely cover my bills. (This advice also assumes that we all know what our passions are, and many of us don’t. We often discover them along the way.) Maybe when the end goal was to get married, and making a little money on the side was sufficient, the idea of dabbling in work we enjoyed without worrying about how much we were paid for it was okay. But not anymore.
The fact is, if you focus only on going after your passion, the pay often doesn’t follow. I say that from experience. But we can do work we love—work that we feel so compelled to do, and so enjoy doing, that it often doesn’t feel like work—and also make a good living. We just have to consciously seek that out, rather than assume the money will naturally follow.
“You want to be doing something that you love, or something that is logically going to lead to something you love, in order to do your best work. That desire will make you more creative and more resourceful, and will help you get further faster. And it will help you persist,” write the coauthors of Just Start: Take Action, Embrace Uncertainty, Create the Future in a 2012 Harvard Business Review article. “But, let’s be real. None of this guarantees wealth, or even financial success.”
Maybe, instead of trying to identify our passion and thinking about how we can indulge it, we can look at what we naturally enjoy doing and are good at—basically, what we have to contribute to the world. And then look at what needs we can fill with those gifts that will also allow us to earn enough to support the life we want.
If you want to spend most of your time doing purposeful work you love and get paid well for it, you have to figure out how to match what you do well with what employers or clients need and then factor in what they’re willing to pay for it. That’s not often the way we approach our careers though. Certainly not the way I did at first.
But in spring 2019, I went to an all-day workshop that transformed the way I looked at work. It was taught by a successful entrepreneur who’d founded a digital company, sold it for big bucks, and now devoted himself to helping other entrepreneurs level up and scale their businesses. I wasn’t an entrepreneur then, but he emphasized that even employees must think entrepreneurially, especially now, as well-established industries are being disrupted by upstarts and few people can count on staying with one employer for long. We’re all, in a sense, building our own brands and value.
He talked passionately about a concept called ikagai, a Japanese word that translates roughly to “reason for being.” I was skeptical at first, tired of the old tropes like “Chase your bliss.” If you do what you love but make so little money you can barely cover rent, how blissful is that? I’d been there, and I didn’t want to go back. But I also didn’t want to spend my days doing work I didn’t love just to make money, something I was worried was beginning to happen. The ikagai model seemed to address both. And it resonated.
As he spoke, I took out a piece of paper and drew a line down the middle. On one side I wrote the things I’d done that week that I really enjoyed—work that felt effortless or fired me up and gave me energy. On the other side I listed the tasks that felt like effort and left me drained. When I was done, I had a lot more on the “lot of effort” side. And I realized that many of the actions on the effortless side were being squeezed in among the others. Uh-oh.
Next he asked us to make two lists:
What we love to do
What we’re good at
Then he asked us to review those lists to see where there was overlap between them and where they had these additional criteria:
What the world needs
What others will pay us for
As I looked over my lists, a pattern slowly began to emerge. I realized with a start that as my job description evolved, I’d started spending a lot more of my time doing work that I didn’t enjoy and that didn’t leverage what I was best at—what some call our “genius.” The creative aspects of the job that had attracted me to it in the first place had been shrinking, and I found myself spending more and more time on process-oriented tasks, project and people management, and meetings. And as I reviewed the lists of what I loved and knew I was good at, I realized that a lot of that was being channeled outside my job.
This is the kind of assessment we are rarely taught to do. We may do strengths training and generally identify what we’re good at, but we often don’t audit our day-to-day to-do lists with an eye toward identifying where we’re most effective and what tasks drain our energy and play against our strengths. Nor do we consider whether our natural strengths and interests are being leveraged as they could be.
Men have gotten accustomed to dumping the work they don’t want to do on the women around them. We have not had that luxury, historically. So we often pile on responsibilities and plow through them without giving much thought to what we’re best at, what comes naturally, and what might be better handled by someone else. That’s especially true early in our careers, as we’re trying to figure all that out—and sometimes just trying to pay the bills. Yet even as we progress in our careers, we often don’t think to ask if the work we’re spending much of our time on actually suits us, and allows us to hone our strengths and work most effectively. How often are we doing work that only we can do?
It’s not just that we tend to take on extra work (including, yes, a lot of that office housework and other non-promotable work) but that we often end up taking on roles or responsibilities that don’t necessarily align with our interests, talents, or true desires. We may be good at doing them, but that doesn’t mean they serve us or allow us to have the impact we want. That’s a lesson I had to learn myself. When I started to feel exhausted after work, I initially thought it was a result of taking on too much—and there was definitely some of that. But as I dug deeper, I realized some of it was also a result of the kind of work I was taking on.
I’m not just talking about avoiding that non-promotable grunt work. It’s also possible to find yourself in a job spending a majority of your time doing higher-level responsibilities and tasks that . . . you just don’t enjoy and that don’t play to your strengths. Part of our work as breadwinners is getting to a deeper understanding of how and where we can add the most value—to a company or business, and also to the world—and then figuring out how best to support that work. Maybe that’s consciously building a team of people with complementary skills and preferences, adjusting our role so that we are able to spend more time on the work we find most meaningful. Or maybe it’s finding or creating a new role for ourselves.
As I sat in that all-day workshop, I wondered: Was it possible to get to a point where I was spending more of my days doing the kind of work that I did love? Work that came naturally to me and that gave me energy and joy but also supplied the income I wanted? And would that mean finding a new job, or just redefining the one I had? After a few hours of jotting down ideas and connecting the dots between my various interests and talents, I began to get an idea of what that might look like. It wasn’t a specific job, but it was a sort of job description that could be applied in different ways.
A few months later, I got a call about a role that lined up surprisingly well with the description. While I ultimately chose not to take the job, it was validation that there is something very powerful about getting clear on what you’re seeking. I don’t know if the universe organizes itself to send it your way—though some people believe that—but I do know that if you aren’t clear on what you’re looking for, you won’t recognize it when it does show up. So it’s beneficial to spend some time writing out what an ideal job description or an ideal workday would look like, even if you don’t know exactly where it would be or what the actual job title would be.
That doesn’t mean that we’ll always do everything we want. “I don’t know one person who says that every single day at work is pure bliss. That just seems inauthentic,” Lisa Johnson, who is the VP of marketing at a patient-driven telehealth company in New York, told me. “What I look for is a company and a role that aligns with my set of values. I think that’s more important. I love what I do, but I don’t need to be living my bliss every minute.”
We can work toward a place, though, where we are spending more and more of our time doing work that brings us joy and plays to our unique strengths. We can look at each position we take as an opportunity to identify the kind of work we most enjoy and excel at and then consider how we can do more of it in a way that allows us to have the most income and impact. And we can look for companies that embody our values and offer opportunities that play to our strengths.
Along the way, we may also need to take some jobs that just pay well or that will allow us to hone our skills in service of the work we eventually want to do—or the life we want to be able to afford. But I can say from experience, and from interviewing dozens of women who are passionate about the work they do and also passionate about getting paid well for it, that it is possible to design a career that supports the life you want, allows you to do meaningful work you enjoy, and compensates you well for it.
Directing the majority of our focus and energy into what we’re already naturally good at is nearly the opposite of what we’re taught to do in school (outside of the arts and athletics). As students, we were encouraged to put extra effort into areas where we were not performing as well in order to bring those grades up, so that we could get good marks across the board. That makes sense if you’re building a basic foundation of skills. But it doesn’t serve us as well once we become adults.
Yet we often make that mistake in our careers: We expend a lot of energy trying to improve our competency levels at tasks and roles that we are not that great at or don’t enjoy. Instead, we should be leaning into what we are naturally good at and enjoy doing in order to hone those skills even further, then seeking to surround ourselves with people who have complementary skills. Otherwise, the risk is that we become competent at a wide range of tasks but not exceptional at any. Not only can that make us more easily dispensable, but it means we may not get the opportunity to deepen the skills and work we are innately good at and have the kind of impact we want to have. We may end up in a role that we don’t excel at or in one that we’re competent at (and maybe even well-compensated for) but don’t enjoy.
That’s what happened to Mayumi Young. At twenty-seven, she seemed to have an enviable life. She had been hired a couple of years earlier by a global telecom company and had been promoted twice since. She was serving as international finance director, traveling the globe, and earning a sizable salary. Based in Southern California, where she lived in an upscale town home, she frequently traveled to the company’s offices in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.
But she told me that she’d pursued a career in accounting simply because she’d gotten an A in her accounting 101 class in college, learned it was a lucrative profession, and had a lot of student debt to pay off. In the end, that foundation would enable her to create a business she’s passionate about. Initially, though, after graduation, she got hired by a major accounting firm to do audits, and then recruited by the telecom company—an offer she took mainly because it offered her a higher salary, a better title, and the chance to travel. But the hours were long, the work could be tedious, and, while she was good at it, it didn’t excite her. While she did love traveling, doing so much of it also began to take a toll.
On one of her many business trips, she remembers waiting in an airport when a woman with a young girl struck up a conversation, asking her what she did for a living. “I gave her my usual answer and made it sound really good,” she told me. The mother turned to her daughter, who was about eleven, and said, ‘Wouldn’t you like to be her one day, too?’”
“That girl looked right at me, and I suddenly realized I wanted to take it all back. I wanted to say, Scrap that. I’m actually miserable. I’m exhausted, and I’m unfulfilled,” Mayumi remembers. “I wanted to tell her instead: Figure out what you really want to do, what lights you up, and go after that. It was a radical wake-up call for me. I decided, in that moment, I was done.”
Within a few weeks, she submitted a letter of resignation. “I definitely do not recommend this as a strategy,” she told me, laughing. “But I was desperate. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, but I knew it wasn’t this.”
After she left her job, she took some time to try to figure out what it was she really wanted to do. “How do you create a career and a life that is in alignment with who you are? I’d never asked myself that before,” she told me. “It started there, setting an intent. I realized I wanted to serve other people using my gifts and talents, and that whatever I did had to both make money and have purpose.”
On reflection, she realized that her interests fell into three spheres: entrepreneurship, education, and finance. She had a strong finance background and accounting degree and knew that she had a natural talent for communicating tough concepts in ways that were easy to understand, and she’d always been entrepreneurial-minded. So she then began looking at how to combine those interests and skills in ways that would allow her to make a difference and also make money. She started by creating a high school financial-literacy curriculum that was picked up and piloted in a local charter school, where she was then hired to become the development director. Then she launched a financial education program for adults called Club Freedom. Over time, her vision and ambition continued to evolve.
Eventually, Mayumi found a way to combine all three of her interests. A CPA, she decided to launch her own company, CPA MOMS®, which pairs CPAs who have kids with small businesses and startups that need accounting help, allowing those moms to create their own book of clients—and their own schedules—so that they have more time for their families and themselves. She developed end-to-end software to support them, and educational content to help them build their businesses, and in 2020 began franchising her company nationwide. At the same time, she began building a community of similarly minded socially conscious entrepreneurs in San Diego, where she lives with her husband, with the intent of looking at how they could collaborate to have a significant impact.
“Ultimately, I believe that our job is to discover what our unique talents and gifts are and then to offer them to the world. That is the journey of life,” she told me. (But you want to get paid well for them, too!)
Figuring out how to combine our passion with the paycheck we want can take time. Often we may find ourselves veering one way or another—either earning a lot but feeling unfulfilled, as Mayumi did initially; or doing work that fills us up but leaves us scrambling financially, as I did—before settling on a path that allows us to both do work we love and make enough money to support the life we want.
“You can’t just make money out of passion. But you have to discover who you are, what brings you joy, and what you’re great at. And I’ve learned the only way to figure that out is by trying different things and seeing what you like and don’t,” Mayumi told me. “And in the beginning, it’s usually a whole lot about discovering what you don’t want to do.”
The trick, I realized, is in creating a path that allows us to do increasingly more of what we love and that comes naturally—and to find or allow others who are better suited to do what doesn’t. That realization was eye-opening for me; it helped me understand why I had found more success and contentment in some roles than others. It also had an almost immediate effect on the way I operated at work. I began to hand off more responsibilities that didn’t support my strengths—not just non-promotable work but also work that didn’t align with what I knew I was innately good at—so that I could focus on those responsibilities that would allow me to leverage my skills. I also spoke candidly with my boss about how I might apply my skills more effectively and about the work I wanted to be more (and less) involved in. Ultimately, I ended up transforming my role entirely.
Outside of ignoring the question of pay, the other problem with the “Pursue your passion!” advice is that it assumes we all know what our passion is, or that we have just one. But as I’ve learned, as have most of the women I interviewed, we often don’t realize what kind of work we really enjoy doing until we try it. (I knew I had an interest in journalism, but I didn’t discover my passion for it until I started doing it.) And we need not limit ourselves to one career path or profession, even if it’s one we love. It’s possible to find work that’s fulfilling and that plays to our strengths in ways we might not have imagined initially.
Take Terri Trespicio. By her midthirties, she had built a successful career in media, advancing to become a senior editor at a national women’s health magazine—“my first big job that aligned with what I thought I wanted to be.” But after a few years in the role, she says she looked at the women in the top two roles of executive editor and editor in chief, both of whom she liked and respected. “And I saw two women who were totally stressed out and exhausted,” she told me. “My executive editor was already there when I got to work in the morning, and she was still there when I left. She was just muscling her way through pile after pile of tasks. And I noted with dread that I didn’t want to be her.”
Terri enjoyed being an editor and host of the magazine’s daily call-in show—“being that person with the cool job to talk about at parties.” But she also realized that she needed a path that would allow her to earn more but not demand so much of her time and energy that she had little left for anything or anyone else.
When a new editor in chief arrived, layoffs soon followed. And Terri was among those who got a severance package. It was just what she needed to chart a new course. Anticipating that she might leave, she’d already been making connections with women she admired. She wasn’t sure exactly what to do next though. “So I asked myself, What am I good at? I thought, ‘I can write and listen and take ideas and turn them into something people will listen to and read. I can do any kind of content.’ Then it was time to look at what people needed.”
She reached out to a woman who was the editor of another magazine, explained she’d been laid off, and asked if there was anything her magazine needed. “She said, ‘Our sales department needs some content we can sell.’ I said, ‘I can do that,’” Terri told me. Then she got a second client, the former publisher of the magazine where she’d worked, who was now leading a small startup.
She wasn’t chasing a passion. She was looking pragmatically at where her talents met the market’s needs. And that’s key. It’s less about pursuing your passion per se than it is about leaning into work you enjoy and are good at—and figuring out how best to apply it so that you can earn what you want. Within one month of being let go, Terri had two clients who were paying her more than she’d ever been paid. Within two months, she was earning more than double her old salary. She still hadn’t figured out exactly what she wanted to do. But when an opportunity came along for her to media train authors and experts, it started to click into place: what she was good at, what she enjoyed doing, what people would pay for, and what the world (or a good number of clients, anyway) needed.
After interviewing dozens of people over her career as an editor, Terri had firsthand experience in watching people struggle to convey what they meant. She found she had a natural talent for helping them crystallize what they were trying to say, and she enjoyed it. “I realized I was good at that, and it was fun,” she told me.
So she delved into it, thinking about the different ways that process could be applied. “I realized I was retrofitting a brand message,” she said. “And then I realized, this is what people need.”
Over time, she built a successful branding business, expanding her services to include helping others do everything from generate branded content to TED talks. (Her own TEDx Talk, “Stop Searching for Your Passion,” has gotten more than 6 million views.) She started to add paid courses and online offerings, and then later, live events and retreats. But all of it came back to the core talent she’d identified years earlier. In fact, her LinkedIn profile reads: “I do one thing exceptionally well: I identify, distill, and articulate critical brand messaging—and I do it for a range of individuals and companies across a range of industries, from financial services to fashion, and from seasoned pros to budding entrepreneurs.”
By discovering and focusing on what only she could do—and continuing to hone her skills in that space—Terri found that she could spend more and more of her time doing work she enjoyed, and that the work she did became increasingly valuable. “Over time with the business, you get a better sense of what you’re really good at, what people need, and what you enjoy,” she said. “The goal is, how do I get so close to the bone of what I am good at that I only have to do that one thing?”
She also got better at understanding the kinds of clients and projects that best suited her. She learned she preferred short, finite projects versus long-term retainers, so she focused on clients with specific problems to solve and restructured her business and pricing to support this. “You can absolutely shape your business for how you work best,” she told me. “I do start-to-finish projects. They’ve gotten shorter and shorter, but more expensive.”
Over time, she’s also arranged her daily schedule so that it fits her natural rhythms. “I know I can do my best work in the morning, so I take a break in the afternoon, take a nap, and then work again in the evenings,” she said. “I judge everything around my idiosyncratic style of work and my energy levels. A lot of running your own business is curating your time.”
Nearly a decade later, Terri is not only making the money she wants, but she’s also at a point where she can pick and choose clients and create a schedule that supports the kind of life she wants. “This idea that you need to know exactly what you should do from the start—you don’t. You just need to pitch a few tents, and you’ll learn,” she told me.
This journey of discovery, she stresses, is not the same as simply pursuing your passion. “If you are sitting around waiting for your passion to show up, you could be waiting a long time,” she said in her 2015 TEDx Talk. “So don’t wait. Instead, spend your time and attention solving your favorite problems.”
Over time, she said, she’s come to view passion through a different lens—as something that arises naturally as you move in the direction of work you enjoy and that meets people’s needs and makes a positive difference in their lives. Ultimately, she said, “Passion lives in realizing what you have to contribute.”
Terri’s story resonated with me. As I thought about what I might want to do next, it became clear that it wasn’t about focusing so much on a particular role or title, but rather on the impact and the life I wanted to have. And that would inform whatever work I did.
Ultimately, we all want to feel like we’re making a contribution—that the work we’re doing matters. That it is purpose-driven and makes a difference in people’s lives. And that we can make enough doing it to support our own lives.
One of the joys of getting to a place in your life where you’re not in financial-survival mode anymore is that you have the opportunity to reflect more on how you want to spend your days and the kind of work you want to do. You can allow yourself to make choices guided by where you can create the most value and impact and get well-compensated for it (and have fun doing it!)—and feel less bound to a particular job title or career path. It’s a different way of looking at success, one that we get to define ourselves.